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Setting my sights on the future.
Moving it into focus.
Lining up the shot.
Boom.
28
Summer, Present Day
Finn
The cabin is cleared out. This stupid shack that Sally refused to move from, its crumbling walls long ago replaced with new drywall and paint, its rotting floors replaced with hardwood and carpet. The place remained tiny but was made livable thanks to new pipes, new appliances, new faucets, new everything. Everything but that blasted sofa.
She finally told me it was the last thing her papa brought home, plucked it from the edge of someone’s driveway, and tossed it in the back of his truck back when he was the town garbage collector. It was the only item in this house she refused to part with. I’m taking it with me. With us.
Billi’s arms come around me from behind, her hands linking together at my waist, her forehead resting between my shoulder blades. My love. My wife of twenty-one years because it took me four years to get up the nerve to ask her to marry me. Before that, it took me a couple weeks to decide to give Silver Bell a permanent link to my life. I split my time between this town and Houston, and kept that way of life up for a half-decade. Billi is patient with me. Always has been from the moment I stepped foot inside the motel nearly twenty-five years ago.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“You keep asking me that today.”
“I keep wanting to know.”
I lower my head to stare at the floorboards I’ve walked across so many times in the last quarter-century. I don’t know how I am right now. Physically and emotionally tired from the past week moving back and forth from hospital to hospice care. Sad from the final day and the exchange of last words.I love you. I’ll miss you. You changed me. Grief-stricken from the sight of Sally’s casket at the cemetery. Heartsick at everything we lost while extremely thankful for everything we found in the end. A love and respect that went both ways. A friendship closer than any I’d experienced before.
A mother-son relationship in every way that mattered.
In the end, we never found out the truth. A mutual decision was made after much thought, prayer, and discussion. On my end, I wanted to honor both the memory of my mother and the reality of the bond I formed with Sally. On her end, she wanted to honor me. She’d lived her life shaking a vengeful fist at an unfair past, and she had grown weary of looking behind her. So, we decided—she would be the mother I no longer had, and I would be the son she lost. Billi hated our stance at first—how could you not find out?—but she grew to accept it, even admire it. When three decades have passed, and there’s no one left to punish, it comes down to a choice. You can either stay bitter, punishing yourself in the process. Or you can buy the land next door, build a house in the middle of a grove of apple trees, and look ahead to the future. Life is short, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to spend mine paying for someone else’s bad decisions. Neither was Sally. Not anymore.
She adopted me in every way but legally, and then she married Paul. Together and with Billi, we formed a tight-knit bond. To paraphrase a Bible verse, a cord of four strands isn’t easily broken.
The bond was a strong one.Isa strong one.
Made even stronger when Billi and I added a fifth strand to the mix.
“I don’t know how I feel yet,” I say honestly. “Thankful. Melancholy. Sad. Glad you’re here with me. Certain that I wouldn’t be anywhere without you in the first place.”
“I’m glad too, mainly that my Magic 8-Ball demanded I help you when we first met. Just think, what if it hadn’t said“It is decidedly so”when you asked for my help that first time? Where would we be now?”
I shake my head, unable to keep a small smile at bay. “That stupid ball. We would be exactly where we are now because I would have smashed it into a thousand pieces if it had said anything else.”
“Shhhh, it might hear you.”
“It’s in a box in the attic.”
“That’s what you think. I dragged it out when you weren’t looking. How else do you think I could have agreed to having our daughter?”
I close my eyes. Billi has always had a knack for turning my mood around, even if she is ridiculous.
“I figured that was due to my charm and undeniable sexiness.” My arms tighten at her waist, and she leans up for a kiss.
“If I never hear either of you say the word sex again…I’ll forgive it this one time. Gross guys. All that making out is burning my eyes.” Our sixteen-year-old daughter walks into the house holding an apple nearly as red as her hair. “I picked this off the tree in the back, along with a few more. Figured I would make a pie tonight in honor of grandma.” Her watery voice breaks a bit on the last word. The two of them were close, about as close as two people with generations between them can be.
I smile at her thoughtfulness, overcome with gratitude, remembering the day we told Sally she was going to be a grandmother. How happy she was that day. All the preparations. All the excitement. That day, Sally finally agreed to let me fix up her house, saying no grandchild of hers would crawl around on dirty floors.
A daughter.Ourdaughter, Billi’s, and mine.
The second we found out Billi was pregnant, we knew it would be a girl. Just like we knew what her name would be, without question.
We named her Sally.
Sweet, sweet Sally.
As sweet as her namesake.
THE END
